If you’ve been following the recent headlines about Cuba, chances are you’ve heard that the Communist island is undergoing major changes. In reality, President Raúl Castro’s vaunted reforms essentially amount to some modest economic adjustments, not unlike those that Havana implemented during the “special period” of the mid-1990s, following the demise of the Soviet Union.

For example, Cuba has increased the number of legally permissible self-employment activities, which will give a slight boost to domestic entrepreneurship. The regime has also pledged to let citizens “sell” their homes, but this doesn’t really make sense, because those homes are officially government property. As Cuban dissident economist Oscar Chepe told the Financial Times, the Castro reforms are “too little, too limited, and too late.” Communist authorities are not fundamentally revamping the Cuban economic system; they are merely treading water, attempting to stay afloat amid the country’s worst crisis since the 1959 revolution.

While the economic changes have been meager, the political changes have been virtually nonexistent. Saying that regime officials will heretofore be limited to two five-year terms, as Raúl Castro did in April, is not much of a concession. After all, the Cuban Communist Party (CCP) continues to wield absolute, totalitarian power. Without political pluralism and free elections, term limits are meaningless. The two men who now sit directly below Castro in the CCP hierarchy are octogenarian José Machado Ventura and near-octogenarian Ramiro Valdés: both members of the original revolutionary generation, and both ideological hardliners. (Valdés founded Cuba’s notoriously brutal G2 spy agency.)

In other words, Cuba is still quite a long way from a genuine transformation. And indeed, even as the Castro regime attempts to convince gullible Americans and Europeans that it deserves normalized relations, it can’t help but show its true colors. Consider the ongoing saga of Alan Gross, a 62-year-old American humanitarian worker who traveled to Cuba a few years ago as part of a USAID-funded mission aimed at helping the island’s tiny Jewish population (estimated at 1,500) obtain Internet access. That seemingly harmless act was enough to make him a national-security threat in the eyes of Communist authorities, who jailed Gross on bogus spying charges at the end of 2009 and sentenced him to a 15-year prison term this past March. On August 5, a Cuban court upheld his sentence, prompting fierce condemnations from Washington.

The Gross affair has poisoned bilateral relations at a moment when Cuba is mired in a terrible economic slump and desperately needs hard currency. Which begs the question: Given its desire for U.S. concessions — such as a lifting of the travel ban — why does the Castro government insist on detaining an obscure USAID contractor whose only “crime” was to provide a very small number of Cubans with Internet equipment?

Simple: The regime fears Alan Gross because, like any repressive dictatorship, it fears an informed, organized citizenry that can utilize modern communications tools. More specifically, it fears the USAID-backed Cuban democracy programs and wants to bully Washington into canceling them. Many U.S. lawmakers — including Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry — believe those programs are ineffective, but Havana apparently considers them a significant threat to Communist rule.

Indeed, Cuba’s fear of the USAID programs is sufficient reason to maintain and even expand them, while also ensuring that the relevant funds are spent efficiently. If Cuban authorities felt that the programs were merely a trivial annoyance, they wouldn’t have sentenced Alan Gross to 15 years in prison. The Communist leaders recognize that when dictatorships lose their monopoly on information, their monopoly on political power begins to weaken as well. That’s why Gross remains in jail: His attempt to promote greater Internet access in Cuba was perceived as a direct challenge to the government’s iron-fisted control of all media.

Needless to say, the 15-year sentence is an outrage, and U.S. officials should continue demanding Gross’s release. Moreover, they should tell Havana that not a single concession will be made — no more relaxing of the travel ban, no more loosening of the trade embargo, no negotiations over Cuban spies convicted in the U.S. — until he is returned home. America’s Cuba sanctions are frequently denounced as archaic, but they give the United States some real leverage over the Castro regime. Washington should use every bit of that leverage to liberate Havana’s American prisoner.

Jaime Daremblum, who served as Costa Rica’s ambassador to the United States from 1998 to 2004, is director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the Hudson Institute.

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1.
Kenneth

The Cuban gov’t is still obsessed with the gangster Mayer Lansky. Anti-Semitism plays no small roll in the Cuban gov’t over reaction to Gross and the Internet equipment he was bringing to the Cuban Jewish group.

U.S. concessions towards Cuba went into effect just this week, AFTER Gross’s sentence was confirmed. There are new flights from Puerto Rico, for example. We should be demanding that Hill and O roll back existing concessions, not just halting additional concessions. And we should demand that our weasely Congressmen and Senators make the same demands of the Administration.

So? Cuba is its own sovereign country and who cares what happens in there? I don’t. If they want a socialist nation where the class disparity between the wealthy and poor is limited, where education is free, where medical school is free, where no one is hungry or homeless, and neither B.P. nor Exxon/Mobil can tap into their large resource of oil, who cares. And if Cuba is antisemitic, who cares. They are also anti-Christian too. As a matter of fact, they are anti-religion too.

Huh?
Remove your name as Rush Limbaugh.
Yeah, the disparity between rich and poor is limited. Everyone is poor, except the goons of the regime who terrorize those the regime wants destroyed, like people who want to be free, for example. The goons may get an extra egg or some liquor. When you are starving, you might be willing to harass a neighbor who is troublesome to the Castros.
Education is free because it is all propaganda all the time and if you don’t go along, you lose all privileges to go ahead with your other education. If you become a doctor, you are then a slave for the tyrants who can ship you out to foreign countries where the Castros can make money selling your services. You are guarded in case you get ideas of escaping. Besides there is always the threat of harm to loved ones to keep you in line.
Rush Limbaugh, I fear your real name is either Michael Moore or Ron Paul. Whatever your real name is, you are a fool.

I was just a teenager back in 1959 but I can still recall the great hullabaloo, predominantly positive hulabaloo, over Fidel Castro, with the media referring to him as the “George Washington of Cuba” and exulting over their darling’s victory over the evil Fulgencio Batista, with teachers all a-bubble with excitement since Cuba was finally free.

Not only was Batista, El Hombre, a dictator but he had illegally seized power, had consorted with gamblers and known criminals, and suffered from the severe liability (to American leftists) of being friendly toward the United States.

Similar to the 2008 hype for Barack Hussein Obama, his successor, Fidel Castro was hailed a a savior, a man of the people who would bring joy and prosperity to his island nation. Fidel couldn’t quite walk on water as Obama could but he seemed to share most other Obama qualities and oratorical skills, sans teleprompters.

Not known at the time, with the able assistance of his fellow Marxist revolutionary, Che Guevara, Fidel would imprison and murder tens of thousands of his countrymen, come close to initiating World War III, and reduce Cuba to an economic basket case.

Although they may not smoke cigars because Islam and Allah frown on tobacco products, the Libyan rebels now on the verge of deposing Muammar Khadaffi and hopefully doing unto him what Iraqis did unto Saddam Hussein may very well turn out to be far worse for U.S. interests than both “mad dog of the Middle East” and the mad dog of the Caribbean.

Khadaffi was certainly not one of America’s best buddies and continued to support international Islamic terrorism yet he, allegedly, abandoned his efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction in 2003, after America massively visited mass destruction on Afghanistan and Hussein’s regime.

Nevertheless, “The devil you know . . . ” and Libyan rebel devils may soon make the United States yearn for the good, old Muammar days.

Our president, peace-lover that he is, refused to concede that our war in Libya was even a war.

The White House opted to describe the conflict as a “kinetic military action” while we kinetically led NATO forces against Khadaffi loyalists, launched hundreds of kinetic Tomahawk cruise missiles against Tripoli and loyalist strongholds, and gave Syria’s equally-treacherous Bashar al-Assad a free pass.

You see, war bad, kinetic military action good in Obamaese. As for Assad, the Obamians haven’t a clue what to do.

Like Fidel Castro who was deemed good contrasted with Fulgencio Batista, the Libyan rebels are likewise considered the good guys compared to Khadaffi. Like Castro, they are likely to bite America on its collective arse, only more severely. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5353.)